


You Know What They Say About Foxes (They'll Break Your Heart)

by cptsdcarlosdevil



Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Complete Incompetence At Feelings, Denial, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Internalized Speciesism, Interspecies Relationship(s), Interspecies Romance, Interspecies Sex, Lack of Communication, Next Door Neighbors As Greek Chorus, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-19
Packaged: 2018-05-31 07:01:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6460429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cptsdcarlosdevil/pseuds/cptsdcarlosdevil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick and Judy having sex was an accident. Nick and Judy falling in love was even more an accident. And as long as she repressed her emotions enough, Judy was pretty certain that she could pretend that neither of them had ever happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> aka 
> 
> "ohmigod I seem to have accidentally become a furry"

The first time Nick and Judy had sex was an accident.

When Nick was in the police academy, they’d stayed up late at night talking. The rationalization Judy used was that she was helping him study, but most of the time they just talked: they’d swap stories about their childhoods; Judy would ask Nick for help on the cases she just couldn’t crack; Nick would regale Judy with stories of the elaborate social games at the academy (Judy wasn’t sure if she was happy or sad that she’d been so busy doing pushups that she’d missed all of her year’s drama). Some nights Judy would fall asleep holding the phone and wake up in the morning, drool all over the screen, hearing Nick’s slow breathing.

She’d almost been sad when he became her partner: solving crimes with him was great, but she’d miss their long nights talking. But now instead of talking by phone they went back to his place or hers. It was better. She could touch his soft fur, and neither one needed to make a pretense of studying.

She’d never before known anyone who just got her the way that Nick did. It was hard to admit it, even to herself, but Judy had been lonely. Most people’s reactions to a bunny who wanted to be a cop ranged from condescending pity to finding it a weird yet lovable personality quirk; she aggressively ignored the former and surrounded herself with the latter and tried to pretend she didn’t notice how funny they found the thought of her achieving her dreams. Then she was at the academy and she didn’t have any time for friendship in between learning to beat up rhinos, and then there was Nick, who was-- in a very real sense-- her first friend.

“You never act like it’s strange that I’m a bunny cop,” Judy said one night while they were sitting on Judy’s bed with her face nuzzled into Nick’s shoulder.

“Is it?” Nick said lazily.

“You don’t see any other bunnies on the force.”

“Trust me, Carrots,” Nick said, “anyone with your implacable devotion to duty and sheer stubbornness would wind up a cop even if they were a literal amoeba.”

“You don’t laugh at me,” Judy said.

“I laughed at you,” Nick said. “I definitely did laugh at you. Maybe you need to get your head checked, little bunny, you’re contracting Bunny Alzheimers.”

“It’s called-- never mind. The point is, you stopped,” Judy said.

“Yes, because I had not been aware at the time that you were the proverbial unstoppable force and I”-- he made a sharp gesture--”am very far from an unmovable object.”

Judy nudged his arm. “Yep,” she said. “You seem to move just fine to me.”

“From my perspective,” Nick said, “people have a ten-minute grace period. After ten minutes, if they don’t see how much of a threat you are, it’s their own fault. Which will be swiftly and karmically punished by fifteen years in the clink. ”

And then it happened. Judy moved just a little bit forward and to the side-- just to make her point about how much it meant to her, really, that he saw her that way, that she had earned his grudging respect with exactly the same amount of effort it would have taken anyone else to earn his grudging respect-- when suddenly their faces slammed together.

When her lips met his, Nick made a noise like “mmph” and pulled her body close to him, kissing her more firmly. He was warm. There were tongues. Judy meeped.

Judy was not inexperienced. She had observed when she was sixteen that she was a virgin, and had located a male and (in the interests of empiricism) a female bunny to change this fact. She had approached her loss of virginity with the same determination that she approached everything else. Judy had found sex enjoyable, but a distraction from police work, and had never returned either bunny’s calls.

Kissing Nick was not enjoyable, however. Rides at the fair were enjoyable. Meeting her newest little sibling was enjoyable. Watching an episode of Claw and Order after she got home from work was enjoyable. Kissing Nick was...

It was ecstasy, it was euphoric, it was bliss. It sent shudders of electricity through her body and made her ears stand on end and she had not actually realized that it was possible for mammals to feel this way. She felt almost drunk on his kisses.

She would have expected there to be some confusion about snouts-- his mouth was much longer than hers-- but he seemed to know exactly what he was doing. He was guiding her, making sure that it was wonderful rather than awkward, but not in a dominant, take-charge sort of way. The male rabbit she’d kissed had acted like he was the boss, just because he was male, and she would be his delicate sweet submissive little bunny; Nick kissed her like a collaboration between partners.

She hadn’t realized, before, that the way mammals kissed reflected their personality, but Nick kissed in a way that was unutterably Nick. His kiss was cool and collected, slow and sardonic, but with a little intoxicating hint that you might be getting under his shell. She loved it, as she loved everything else about him, and she felt like she must be the happiest bunny in the world.

Judy had memorized the criminal code and thus knew it was not the case, but even so she felt that anything that felt that good had to be illegal.

He reached a hand up under her shirt and began to touch and, oooh, that felt nice. She ran a hand up Nick’s back and felt his warm, soft fur. Fur. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. He’d managed to take off his shirt while she was distracted by kissing him. She was briefly impressed by his manual dexterity, and about three minutes later she came to a horrifying realization about what they were about to do.

In her defense, Nick had done a really interesting thing with his tongue and she was mostly concerned with that for a while, and then her thoughts were mostly something like “warm, soooooooft” as she got acquainted with his fur. She would probably have been much more quick on the uptake otherwise.

The realization was definitely horrifying. Judy was certain of this. It was just that the thought of it had sent a shudder of pleasure through her, and even now her entire body was throbbing with want and need. She wasn’t sure precisely what she wanted and needed, mind you-- she had never done this before but she was pretty certain they wouldn’t, um, interlock in the desired fashion-- but whatever it was they were going to do she wanted and needed it very badly.

A small voice inside Judy’s head suggested that the correct thing to do would be to stop this right now. The rest of Judy was screaming “no” and gagging that small voice before it got any more bright ideas.

With tremendous force of will, Judy pulled away from the kiss. “I’m not-- actually sure how this is going to work,” she said. “I haven’t, uh, with a member of another species.”

“I have,” Nick said.

“You have?” Judy reeled. Her mind was suddenly full of extremely interesting images that made the throbbing all through her even more insistent.

“Not with a bunny, obviously, no bunny would let me get close enough,” Nick said. “Actually, I’m usually the smaller one.” The mental images grew more interesting. “But the-- general principles still apply.”

“General principles?” Judy asked.

“Tongues,” Nick said. “Paws. Toys, if you want to get creative, but I’m pretty sure you don’t have any.”

Judy was about to ask a question like, _toys? Like the dolls my little sisters and brothers have? I have some I was planning to give them as presents…_ but then Nick started kissing her again and the question suddenly seemed a lot less interesting and, indeed, continued to seem uninteresting throughout her discovery of what precisely Nick meant by ‘tongues’.

\--

The next morning, Judy woke up in a panic. Oh god. She had just had sex with Nick. She had just had-- perverted, disgusting, wrong-- sex with a member of another species, who was her partner, and a fox of all things, and ohmigod what were Mom and Dad going to think, and she was pretty sure this was a violation of a dozen regulations, and what the fuck was she thinking--

Well. She wasn’t thinking. That was the problem.

Judy peeled open one eye. The bed was empty; only she was inside it. She breathed a sigh of relief. It was a weird dream, nothing more. She would tell Nick about it and he would laugh and it would probably become another injoke--

“I understand that you are what you eat, Carrots, but this is ridiculous,” came a horrifyingly familiar voice.

Judy pulled a pillow over her face. This could not be happening. She felt a horror growing in the pit of her stomach. What if it changed things? What if they were so crushingly awkward around each other now that they couldn’t be partners anymore, and she had to switch and become partners with Francine instead, and she lost her best friend in the whole entire world because she couldn’t keep it in her freaking pants when faced with an accidental kiss, and she would have to be alone again?

“Why would anyone bother to make microwaveable carrots?” Nick said. “They’re carrots! You eat them raw!”

“Some of us like having warm food sometimes,” Judy said, falling easily into the old pattern of banter, even while it felt like her brain was exploding and dribbling out bits through her ears. “And for some of us that can’t come in the form of flesh.”

“There are plenty of vegetables that are supposed to be cooked,” Nick said. “Cabbage, for instance. If you had microwaveable cabbage, I wouldn’t say a thing.”

“When you’ve lived on carrots for as long as the average bunny does,” Judy said, removing the pillow from her face optimistically, “you want some variety.”

“In conclusion,” Nick said, spreading his arms wide, “there is not a single thing in your apartment that I am willing to eat.”

“You’re a predator,” Judy said, relaxing a fraction. “Of course I don’t have food for you.”

“That’s bigotry and stereotyping and you know it,” Nick said. “Foxes are omnivores. Come on, I know this great breakfast place. My treat.” He lifted his eyebrows. “Unless, of course, you can’t live without getting your delicious inexplicably microwaved carrots…”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Judy laughed. It was only a little bit hysterical.

\--

That seemed to be the end of it. Nick seemed to be almost aggressively treating her the same way that he’d treated her before: he touched her neither more nor less than usual; he said “you know you love me” with the same easy air; he mocked her with the same sharpness and the same underlying humor; and, much to Judy’s dismay, he did not do any more of the paperwork. He didn’t go to her apartment to chat for the next few nights, but they’d often gone a week or two without visiting, and to be honest Judy was far too freaked out about what had happened to be willing to host him. Neither of them mentioned the previous night. It seemed like as long as neither of them acknowledged it, it was like it had never happened.

It was a relief. The emotion that Judy was feeling right now was definitely relief. Of course, it was awfully similar to disappointment, but being disappointed that you didn’t get to have perverted sex with your best friend would be absolutely ridiculous, so Judy was pretty sure she was relieved.

Maybe she was anxious? That it would ruin their friendship somehow that she hadn’t thought of yet? That would be a very plausible thing for her to feel.

As odd as it was, it seemed like the biggest effect on Judy’s life would be on her relationship with her neighbors.

“The bunny got LAID,” Bucky said.

“And she was enjoying herself,” Pronk said. “We could hear it.”

“The whole apartment building could hear it,” Bucky said.

“Probably everyone in a three-mile radius could hear it,” Pronk said.

“That fox is good at what he does,” Bucky said. “You know what they say about foxes. ‘Once you go red, you’ll love to be bred.’”

“That’s sick,” Pronk said. “I don’t support that interspecies stuff. Bunnies are supposed to fuck bunnies, foxes are supposed to fuck foxes. It’s just unnatural.”

“They’ve been pining for each other for years,” Bucky said. “We’ve had to hear it.”

“Nonstop.”

“It’s awful.”

“And sick,” Pronk said. “She should get over it and find a nice bunny to date instead.”

“If she hasn’t gotten over it in the past two years, she’s not going to get over it,” Bucky said. “It’s listening to them fuck or listening to her cry herself to sleep.”

That was slander. Judy had never cried herself to sleep, except that one time, and she had had a very emotional case earlier in the day.

“I’d rather have the crying,” Pronk said. “At least I can sleep through crying.”

“It’ll give us a sense of what it’s like for everyone else to live next to us,” Bucky said. “Empathy and all that. My therapist says empathy is a great idea.”

“And what about the ones who are neither us nor the bunny, hm? Maybe some of them want to get some sleep. That’s some empathy for you right there.”

Judy threw a pillow at the wall. Pining. Who would ever think she was pining? She had never pined. They were just friends who had made an extremely ill-advised life choice one time. It was nothing.

\--

About a week after the incident, there was a single rap on the door. Judy felt a sinking feeling in her stomach. It was the landlady, probably, telling her about another care package from home (Judy’s parents seemed to view the outside world as a sort of very extended form of summer camp). It was definitely not--

Him.

Judy’s fur stood on end. Oh god. Oh god he had come back and that meant he wanted to kiss her again and she didn’t know whether she wanted him to or not and she wanted to die.

“Having seen the way you’re living,” Nick said, “it would be unconscionable for me not to get you some better food.” Judy tensed. He referenced that night and that meant he wanted to, he wanted to, and that meant that she would, and that meant--

“Carrots,” Nick said, “you going to let me in?”

Judy had practice moving when tharn. That was pretty much the only reason she managed to move to the side, and even so Nick had to shove through.

Still, Nick didn’t seem to notice Judy’s internal conflict, closing the door behind him and offering her a white box. Takeout. According to the logo on the side, Panda Express.

There was nothing for it but to take the proffered box and plastic fork, open it up, and start to poke through it. Food was an antidote to tharn, right? Right. “It’s all bamboo.”

“Well, they are pandas,” Nick said.

Judy shrugged and ate a mouthful. It was, she had to admit, better than carrots.

And… this was takeout. Which implied he wanted to eat the takeout. And while Judy admitted that she didn’t know much about Nick’s taste in sick sexual games, she bet that bamboo was probably not involved. He had been in her house for a whole minute and there hadn’t been any kissing yet. Maybe he didn’t even want to kiss her. Maybe he legitimately just wanted to eat bamboo with her and they were going to snuggle and talk and never mention that night again and their friendship would be back to normal in every way except for the sniggers from her neighbors.

(They were sniggering quite loudly right now. Judy very much hoped Nick wasn’t listening.)

Unaccountably, this thought made Judy feel kind of sick. It was okay. It was like her dad always said: there’s no problem that can’t be solved through vast amounts of emotional repression!

Nick plopped on the bed and started eating his own bamboo. “Have you ever thought about getting a television?”

Judy’s expansive gesture showed off how little space there was for a TV.

“Eh, I bet you could cram one by the refrigerator,” Nick said. “A small one. Getting Chinese takeout sucks without watching a movie.”

“Does it now?” Judy said, sitting beside him, leaving a chaste inch of space.

Nick did not seem interested in the chaste inch of space, wrapping his paw around her shoulder and yanking her close. “Yep. Nutflix and chill.”

Judy shook her head, ignoring the shivers his touch sent through her body. “You can never get anything good on Nutflix streaming.”

“Nah,” Nick said, “those squirrels can find good nuts, and they can find good movies.”

Judy was about to say something like “don’t you know that half the reason we have a forest is because squirrels keep forgetting where their nuts are”, but then Nick grabbed her and kissed her and her comments on comparative zoology would be forever left unheard.

Judy had rehearsed endlessly in her mind what she would do if this happened. She would pull away. She would be firm. She would talk about the importance of their friendship, the difficulties of an interspecies relationship, and the stupidity of dating a coworker. He would be sad, but eventually come to understand, and it would be an odd incident which ultimately strengthened their friendship.

In reality, Judy jumped in his lap, pressed herself against him, and started kissing him like she was certain that each kiss would be her last.

“Told you,” Bucky said. “Pay up.”

Pronk grumbled.

“And now we’re going to be quiet,” Bucky said, “so we don’t break the moment.”

“Break the perverted--”

“Shh,” Bucky said. “Or I’m telling your mother about the Incident.”

“You wouldn’t--”

“Shh!”

Judy was not paying a huge amount of attention, because Nick was scritching her fur just right and she felt like curling in a ball and moaning.

Of course, there was no reason she couldn’t curl up and moan, now that she thought about it. So she did so. Nick made a low noise of approval, and Judy felt a wave of pleasure going through her, as much at his enjoyment as at what he had done with his hands.

“Last time you caught me unprepared,” Nick said huskily.

Judy hadn’t caught him at anything. This was an accident. A series of very strange accidents that she took absolutely no responsibility for whatsoever and ooooh if he did that thing again bits of her would be dripping off the ceiling.

“This time,” Nick said, “I brought toys.”

Judy did not want toys. She was a bunny, but she wasn’t six. They were adults, with an adult (perverted) sexual relationship, and she personally felt it was very disrespectful to act like she was a child, and she was totally going to express that when she figured out how to make words again.

\--

On second thought, Judy wanted toys. Judy was very, very much a fan of toys.

\--

“Hi, Mom,” Judy said, “hi, Dad.”

Judy’s parents had realized that their daughter wasn’t going to quit the force and-- given how she hadn’t been injured in the past few years-- was probably about as safe as she was going to get. Fortunately, this meant she heard less on the subject of fox repellant. Unfortunately, they had moved on from the subject of her getting a nice safe job (“what was wrong with being a meter maid?”) to the subject of matrimony.

“Judy!” Dad said. “So, I was talking to Roger-- you know, down the way-- and he said that his boy Timothy is living in the big city Zootopia! He runs his own daycare.”

“Dad,” Judy said.

“We just thought you might like to get to see each other,” Dad said. “You don’t often get to see another kid from Bunnyburrow in the big city.”

Judy sighed and rubbed her temples with her hands. “You want me to date him.”

“I mean, I wouldn’t say no!” Dad said.

“What your father is trying to say,” Mom said, “is that we love you and we want you to be happy. We’re glad you found a career--”

“--although we wish you were doing something safer than hunting murderers with a fox--”

“We’re glad you found a career,” Mom said firmly. “But we just want you to find someone to love. Your father and I couldn’t imagine going through life alone.”

“I’m not alone,” Judy said, “Mom, I have Nick, and Clawhauser, and the rest of the mammals at the station--”

“And can any of them give you kittens?” Dad asked. Not waiting for an answer, he said, “Judy, you’re not getting any younger. And as important as being a police officer is to you, the most important thing in anyone’s life is having children.”

“So, what,” Judy said, “I’m going to come home from a long day of catching bad guys and help my kittens with their homework? Parenthood is just not for me.”

“That’s the advantage of Timothy!” Dad said. “He loves children, his dad talked about how when he has children he wants to transition his daycare to an at-home daycare so he can stay with them. He can take care of your kittens while you’re a big career girl saving Zootopia.” He smiled. “See, we have your best interests at heart.”

“Mom, Dad, I know you want me to be happy,” Judy said. “But I am happy. Right now. Just the way I am. All my dreams came true.”

“But you don’t have anyone to love,” Mom said.

An involuntary image appeared of Nick’s face as his knot began to swell. Judy flushed. It was an automatic reaction to thinking about Nick’s knot while talking to her parents and nobody ought to draw any conclusions from its proximity to the word ‘love’.

Automatic reaction or no, Mom pounced on it. “Oh! You do have someone to love.”

“It’s nothing,” Judy said. She brushed away imaginary cobwebs with one hand, as if brushing away the excruciatingly embarrassing mental image that was apparently not satisfied with haunting her at work and now wanted to haunt her with her parents too.

“Oh, she doesn’t want to tell us about it,” Dad said. “New love. So romantic!”

“Ohmigod,” Judy said, her paws on her face. “This is so embarrassing.”

“Come on, tell us about it,” Dad said with good humor. “You know you can tell anything to your old folks.”

Judy was pretty sure she could not, in fact, tell anything to her old folks. Judy was pretty sure that if she told her parents what exactly she’d done with Nick last night, they would have a heart attack, and she really didn’t want the coldblooded murder of both her parents on her conscience. They had kittens. She’d have to find someone to take care of them. It would be awful.

She had never been more grateful for the neighbors being out.

“Let her be,” Mom scolded. “She’ll tell us when she’s ready.”

Which would be on about the tenth of never.

“So, Dad, how’s the farm going?” Judy asked, hoping her voice was well within acceptable parameters of frantic.

Her parents noticed that she was trying to change the subject but, to their credit, they talked about how the blueberry crop was doing and did not bring up the topic of matrimony again the rest of the night.

\--

“Chief Bogo is completely unreasonable,” Judy complained as she sat in Nick’s car, getting a ride home from work for the last time in a month.

“Aw, come on, Judy, it won’t kill you,” Nick said.

Judy was pretty certain that was not the case.

If she were talking to anyone other than Nick, she would claim that her refusal to take vacation was because she was a rabbit. She knew she would have to be twice as good to go half as far and-- since Judy had no intention of going half as far-- that meant she had to be four times better than any other cop in the ZPD. That meant working harder, being more reliable, and never ever ever taking a vacation day.

But to be honest, that wasn’t true. Judy didn’t know what to do with herself when she wasn’t working. Weekends were bad enough-- she usually had enough errands, exercise, and time with Nick that she only had to spend one or two hours with her ears twitching, staring at the ceiling and wishing that she were back at work. But she wasn’t really sure what she was going to do with four whole weeks.

But Chief Bogo had been firm. “That weasel from Internal Affairs has been sniffing around, Hopps,” he said. “If he finds out how you haven’t taken any of your vacation, it’s my ass on the line.”

Judy wondered if there was such a shortage of actually corrupt cops in the ZPD that Internal Affairs had to spend its time chasing after innocent workaholics.

“What I don’t understand,” Nick said, “is why I’m getting to take advantage of your saved-up vacation time.”

Chief Bogo’s exact words had been “and I know that if that fox is here, you’re going to be in here ‘helping him with his investigations’. I want you to take a real break, Hopps. Get some sun. Read a trashy romance novel. And if I see the tips of either of your ears in here both of you are on meter maid duty for three months.”

“Harsh,” Nick said.

“Call it a hustle,” Judy said.

“Having a workaholic partner is not any hustle I’ve ever heard of,” Nick said.

“Sure it is,” Judy said. “I bet if we were in school together, you would have hustled yourself into my group projects, and graduated with straight As and absolutely no knowledge of chemistry.”

“I have an excellent knowledge of chemistry,” Nick said, hurt.

“And I’m pretty sure you don’t want the ZPD to know how you acquired it,” Judy said.

“Understanding how to synthesize illegal drugs,” Nick said, “is not only perfectly legal but integral to the organization I’m proud to be a part-- hey!” He rubbed the back of his head.

Judy laughed. “You have got to stop writing memos.”

“Well, thanks to you,” Nick said, “I have four weeks where I don’t get to practice explaining why the ZPD should comp me for my Starbucks coffee.”

Judy shuddered. She remembered one time Nick had been undercaffeinated. She had sworn to herself never to allow such a thing to happen again.

“Currently,” Nick said, “I’m planning to claim it’s a species accommodation. Foxes are nocturnal, you know.”

Judy sighed. “I don’t know what to do with myself being on vacation,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve had four weeks with nothing to do since I was a kitten.”

Nick glanced at her, then grinned. “I thought it was obvious what we were going to do,” he said.

It took Judy a moment. Then she felt something sort of like anxiety in her stomach.

Nick had been scrupulous never to mention their nighttime activities even in the most veiled of references; Judy, grateful, had done the same. Outside of her bedroom, they were nothing but what they had always been: the best of friends. Occasionally when Nick was talking about the details of his latest bout with HR (“I think that Feralarri would be great for undercover work, and they should buy it for me”), she saw his face at the moment of orgasm overlayed on his face explaining why paragraph 5C in the rulebook meant it made perfect sense. Still, the separation of the two parts of her life provided a certain amount of comfort, in the form of complete and utter denial.

He was still looking at her. His face was a perfect mask of cool indifference, uncaring about how she’d respond.

“That sounds nice,” Judy said. “We can get coffee, snuggle, watch TV together, nap…”

Nick relaxed an imperceptible fraction. “I, for one, vote that we don’t leave the bed once in the entire vacation.”

“I can support that,” Judy said. “Staying horizontal is definitely following Chief Bogo’s orders, and you know how I feel about orders.”

“You ignore them?”

“Hey!”

“There are some things I’ve been meaning to show you,” Nick said, “but I needed some more time. Good things just can’t be rushed.”

Judy was… eager. Her precious walls of denial crumbling around her, she said, “Like what?”

“Clubs that don’t open until well past your bedtime, Carrots,” Nick said. “Full of… people like us, if you will. Doing what comes naturally.”

Judy blinked. “I hope you mean dancing.”

“And other things.”

Judy instinctively glanced around to make sure that no one could hear, despite the fact that they were in Nick’s car alone and if a hijacker had stowed himself away in the back seat they would have much bigger problems. “People do that in public?”

“I thought rabbits were supposed to be horny,” Nick said. “You know, the old saying, fucking like bunnies…”

“We definitely didn’t have anything like that in Bunnyburrow,” Judy said.

“It’s cute,” Nick said, “two years in the big city and you still get shocked by the darndest things.”

“I’m not shocked,” Judy said. She was definitely shocked. And also… interested. “Wouldn’t going to a club involve leaving the bed?”

“Only temporarily,” Nick said. “Sharp little bunny.”

For some reason, Judy was suddenly a lot more excited by the idea of vacation.


	2. Chapter 2

On average, Judy thought, she was probably as enthusiastic about vacations as anyone else. It was just that most people spread their enthusiasm across dozens of vacations over the course of a lifetime, and Judy crammed all of hers into two weeks of talking, sex, testing out every restaurant in a twelve-block radius, sex, meeting some of Nick’s less shady friends, sex, movie marathons, and sex. 

It was easily the happiest time she’d ever had while not solving a crime, and it was shaping up to beat most of the crimes she’d solved without an accompanying Nick. 

Which was why she was only a little leery as she approached the club that Nick insisted was “a nice place. Very clean. Well, usually.”

The club was on a dingy side street that Judy had missed when they were driving by it; even walking past, it looked more like an alleyway than an entrance to a place of entertainment. “Are you sure we’re in the right place?” Judy asked. 

“Scared, Carrots?” Nick asked. 

“Nobody’s going to be having sex in here, right?” Judy asked. 

“I wouldn’t do that,” Nick said. “Well, not your first time anyway.” The implied second time made Judy’s stomach lurch. 

They approached what appeared to be more wall but which Judy logically deduced must be the door, given the rhino bouncer standing in front of it. He was chewing a toothpick the size of Judy’s thigh. “We’re closed.”

“Aw, come on.” Nick smiled charmingly. “You remember me, right? Nick?”

“Been a while since I’ve seen you,” the rhino said. 

“I’ve been busy,” Nick said. 

“Heard you became a cop,” the rhino said, his monotone voice nevertheless full of obvious displeasure. 

“For the past year,” Nick said, “and notice that there hasn’t been a raid on an interspecies bar in six months.”

The rhino made a low noise. “Harrum.” He seemed to be thinking about it. 

“Foxes always have an angle,” Nick said. 

The rhino did not say that they could come in, but he did step aside. 

“Thanks,” Nick said, “really appreciate it. Come on, Carrots.”

Judy followed him, apprehensive. 

At first, it wasn’t, really, very different from any of the other Zootopian clubs she’d been in (mostly for work, but also for one exquisitely painful attempt at socialization). It was dark; the music was playing much too loud for there to be good conversation; the floor was covered in God-knows-what; there were decorations on the walls that somebody had probably spent a lot of time on, despite the fact that no one except the early-morning janitor would ever see them. It was, however, the best club she’d ever seen in terms of cross-species accommodation: they had chairs large enough for elephants and small enough for mice, sometimes right next to each other, and a corner full of misters for animals who preferred high humidity. Like most cross-species buildings, it mostly managed to make everyone feel equally uncomfortable. If Judy had expected a hive of sin and infamy, she would not find it here. The club was a normal place. 

Until you noticed the mammals. Or, more specifically, what the mammals were doing. 

There was an aardvark locking lips with a kangaroo. A boar nuzzling the shoulder of a deer. An ermine climbing all over a bull. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared. It was just another Friday night. Judy’s eyes were wide as she took it all in.She had known, of course, that interspecies relationships were a thing-- she was, in a certain sense, in one-- but to see it like this, in all its diversity--

Nick reached out and took Judy’s paw. Judy had an impulse to shake him away, to hiss “not in public!”, but she kept her paw in his. They could do this here. Here they were just another couple like anyone else. 

It was nice. 

“It’s not polite to stare,” Nick remarked, guiding Judy to a table. 

“Okay,” Judy said, “but that’s literally a guinea pig and a giraffe. How is that supposed to even work?”

Nick laughed. “You’d be surprised. Stay here, I’ll get us a drink.”

When he got back with two tasty concoctions the ingredients of which Judy was not going to inquire about, Judy asked, “You kept this place for being raided?” 

“I don’t just use my ability to create bureaucratic snafus to get free coffee, Carrots,” Nick said.

“They can’t raid a place for being an interspecies bar,” Judy said, “it’s not illegal.”

“They can raid it for selling liquor without a license,” Nick said. He gestured to the bartender, who was pouring a drink a lamb had bought for a cow. There was a little umbrella in the cup. “And no one will give a license to an interspecies bar. And if that’s not good enough, they can always shut it down for being a den of prostitution.”

“Is this a den of prostitution?”

“Nah, it’s a friendly place, it’s not for work,” Nick said, “but why else would an innocent fragile little bunny like you be with a scoundrel like me?”

Judy swallowed. She couldn’t deny-- even to herself-- that a few years ago she’d have been saying the same thing. 

“There’s a reason people don’t like cops, Carrots,” Nick said. “We don’t just solve murders and return innocent otters to their families. We harass working girls trying to make a living, dealers trying to feed their families, a bunch of people who really haven’t done anything wrong.” His voice was tight. It sounded personal. 

“You used to…” Judy didn’t know how to say it in a polite way. “Work?”

“When I was younger and had a prettier face,” Nick said. “The work wasn’t so bad. You get used to it. Jail, not so much. You ever spend a night in jail, Carrots? I don’t recommend it.” 

“Surely there would have been social services,” Judy said. “It’s not like we just lock you up and throw away the key.” The policy, after all, was to target mammals who bought sex; those who were selling sex were victims. She knew there were bad apples, but she didn’t think Vice went that far away from what she was taught in the police academy. 

“Social services were the worst,” Nick said. “I could make as much in an hour on my back as I could in a week in fast food, and they wanted me to switch? Because of my dignity? Sorry, dignity doesn’t pay my rent.” He was quiet. “Cops like saving people. They’re not so much for inquiring about whether those people want to be saved.”

Judy felt sick. She’d been so enthusiastic as a meter maid. After her success in the Savage Incident, she’d found herself mostly working assaults, kidnapping, and homicide, but she would have been as passionate, as driven, about working Vice as she would have been about anything else she’d be assigned to. She wanted to prove herself worthy of being a cop, and she would do anything to make that happen. 

...And if she had done anything, she would have arrested people who weren’t that much different than Nick. 

“I hate Vice,” Nick said. He smiled without humor. “Turns out there are a lot of working girls and dealers who are a lot more willing to make complaints about Vice if they know they have a sympathetic advocate.” He tilted his head. “Like I said, foxes have always got an angle.”

Judy sipped her drink, not sure what to say. The best part of her wanted to offer to help; another was sad that he had not told her before; a third part felt guilty for what she might have done if things were different; a fourth she didn’t really want to admit to herself wondered what the effects on her career would be of a partner intent on hindering the ZPD in its mission. 

Nick noticed her discomfort. “Let’s dance.”

Judy did not feel that would improve the situation. 

It would be inaccurate to say that Judy had never danced. At the Bunnyburrow Country/Western Dance Hall she had been well-known for her grace and enthusiasm. But glancing at the dance floor, Judy quickly realized that this was not the Bunnyburrow Country/Western Dance Hall. 

“I don’t know how,” Judy said. 

“Look, this music is designed to be danced to by drunk lions with no sense of rhythm,” Nick said, “it’s not that hard.” He took her paw and started to pull her to the dance floor; Judy followed along with him. “You can do it, all you need is to be a little less self-conscious. Normally, of course, that is accomplished with the use of alcohol--”

“--I could use some more alcohol--”

“But I think for now this works fine,” Nick said, pulling her close. “Paw here, paw here, and sort of move to the music… not quite that complicated, but you’re getting the idea...”

Judy had to shout into Nick’s ear to be heard. “This is not really dancing!” 

“Drunk lions, remember?” Nick said. His snout was nuzzled close to Judy’s ear. It was both practical and warm, comforting. Feeling brave, she tilted her head back and planted a kiss on his snout. He purred. 

“This music is terrible,” Judy added. 

“Says the girl who likes Catty Perry and Destiny’s Cub,” Nick said. 

“I will have you know that Catty Perry is a legitimate musician,” Judy said. 

“I kissed a fox and I liked it,” Nick warbled. His voice, even singing jokingly, was quite good-- deep and resonant. “Hope my boyfriend don’t mind it.”

“It’s very relatable,” Judy said. “I have often kissed foxes and liked it. The one difference is that I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“And I don’t have cherry chapstick,” Nick added. “Actually, I don’t know any foxes that wear cherry chapstick. Is that a thing?”

“I think it might just be because it rhymed,” Judy said. 

“It does not rhyme! Liked it and chapstick are barely even slant rhymes!”

“I love that you know what a slant rhyme is,” Judy said. “Hidden depths. You think he’s just a hustler and then it turns out that he secretly has opinions about poetry--”

“I went to literature class,” Nick said, offended.

“You dropped out of school when you were twelve,” Judy said. 

“I didn’t say I went to my literature class,” Nick pointed out. His voice made a low rumbling in his chest which felt nice against Judy’s head. “I had a thriving business selling weed, old tests, and chapter-by-chapter summaries of classic novels.”

“That’s adorable,” Judy said. “--And wrong. Very wrong. As ex-leader of the Bunnyburrow Safety Patrol, I feel duty-bound to say that.”

“Now that is adorable,” Nick said. “What did you do, catch carrot thieves?”

“Sadly, no, that was for the police,” Judy said. “I helped small children cross the street and investigated accusations of cheating.” 

“Bunnyburrow has cops?”

“Cop,” Judy said. “Singular. He used to get tired of me hanging around underfoot and adoring him and send me on snipe hunts.” She considered it thoughtfully. “I never did find the snipe. It must be terribly difficult to find. I followed all the instructions and everything.”

Nick was laughing. Judy could tell that as much through the thrumming in his chest as she could through actually hearing. “What?” Judy said. 

“Carrots, you are adorable,” Nick said.

“What?”

“I’m not going to explain,” Nick said. 

“I can march right over there and dance with the wolf instead,” Judy said.  
“You don’t want to do that,” Nick said. “Four left paws.”

She put her head back into Nick’s chest, feeling the thump-thump of his heart as it contrasted with the thumping of the music, swaying gently in time to the pop artist caterwauling about dancing in the nightclub.

This was possibly the longest conversation she had ever had on the dance floor with someone. On one hand, Judy felt she ought to be surprised by her and Nick’s ability to hold conversations while listening to music at a volume which probably violated multiple safety codes. (She briefly considered shutting them down, then decided not to because this would be a violation of NIck’s ‘no interspecies bars getting shut down’ strategy, then wondered if it still counted if she would have shut down a similarly ear-splitting non-interspecies bar.)

On the other hand, Clawhauser had once challenged her and Nick to a contest: he would not eat donuts, she and Nick wouldn’t banter with each other, and the winner would get the loser’s coffee for a month. She and Nick had taken it, assuming it would be an easy win. They barely lasted twenty minutes. So them having a conversation now probably made sense. It took a lot more than incomprehensibly loud music to stymie Team Banter. 

Nick said something she couldn’t hear. 

“What was that?” Judy asked. 

“Nothing,” Nick said quickly. “Just a thought about the music.”

“That is more thoughts about this music than I ever want to have in my life,” Judy said. “Come on, as long as we’re going to talk, we should really do it at a table where I can actually hear you.”

\--

Nick was curled up in sleep, his face nestled into his tail and his closed eyes looking almost squinty, when Judy suddenly realized he was handsome. 

She had known that before. For one thing, she’d accidentally kissed him and wound up so overwhelmed by his beauty that she had sex with him, had sex with him again a week later, and then devoted several weeks of her life to either having sex with him or recovering from sex with him. That’s not the sort of thing you do unless you are interacting with an extremely attractive fox. 

Perhaps the best way to put it was that she had always known he was hot, but looking at him as he slept she realized for the first time that he was beautiful. 

Nick’s face was normally relaxed. But it was deliberately so. His face was the face of a fox who knew that being relaxed put people at their ease, which made them trust you or let you sneak something by them. A fox who had practiced acting relaxed for so many years that it was the expression his face naturally fell into when he wasn’t paying any attention to it, and if you did not know him very well you might think that it was the way his face naturally looked all the time.

When he slept, Nick’s face was genuinely relaxed. It was a matter, Judy thought, of the little tension he held in the muscles around his eyes while awake, the slight wariness that danced around his lips. In rest, those were gone. 

He looked young.

Judy had not realized before this moment how much of Nick’s age was from experience rather than years lived. She wondered if she too would look old soon. Probably a good thing. It was hard enough to get respect as a bunny (you’d think that criminals would think “wow! A bunny good enough to become a cop! She must be a real badass!”, but it didn’t seem to work that way). A young-looking bunny was just asking for trouble. 

She reached out with one paw and started to rub him behind the ears. He made a low soft noise, still sleeping, and his eyes crinkled up in a smile. She wondered if his dreams were pleasant. She wondered if she was in them. 

\--

Nick came back into Judy’s apartment after his shower, a towel wrapped around his waist. Judy allowed herself a moment to admire him. Shirtless was definitely a good look on him.

“I heard you talking to someone on the phone,” Nick said. “The walls here are super-thin.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” Judy said. There was a conspicuous absence of giggling from the next-door neighbors. 

“What was that all about?” Nick asked.

“My parents.” Judy sighed, flopping dramatically on the bed. “They’re still on me about getting married.”

“Carrots,” Nick said, “do you have a secret fiance you’re not telling me about?”

“No,” Judy said. 

“Good,” Nick said, “because honesty is an important part of a buddy cop slash torrid and deliciously taboo sex relationship. Saw it on Oprah.”

“You watch Oprah?”

“A hustler has to do many disgraceful things following his calling,” Nick said solemnly. 

“There’s this bunny they want to set me up with,” Judy said. “His name’s Timothy. He’s… nice, I guess. He runs a daycare.”

“Thrilling,” Nick said. 

“I just really don’t think I’m the marriage-and-kittens type,” Judy said. “If anything, I’m married to my work. I just… it feels like even after all this time my parents don’t really respect what I want. It feels like they have this vision of what they want my life to be, and it’s totally unrelated to anything I actually care about or that actually makes me happy, and they’re not remotely interested in getting to know the real me.” She sighed. “I love my parents, but sometimes I don’t like them very much.”

“Judy, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Nick said. 

“What?” Judy asked, somewhat taken aback by being interrupted in the middle of angstily opening up her heart about her parents. 

“No, go on, you finish,” Nick said. 

“Okay,” Judy said, trying to remember where she was, even though she was dreadfully curious about what Nick wanted to tell her. “Sometimes I think they’re right. Sometimes I think if I meet the right rabbit, all my priorities will change, and I’ll suddenly really want to give birth to two hundred kittens instead of scheming to make detective.” She shook her head. “Is it messed up that all that does is make me not want to meet the right rabbit?”

“So it’s… definitely a rabbit you would be meeting, then?” Nick said. His voice had an odd intonation to it. 

“I mean, probably,” Judy said. “How many couples do you see that are mixed-species?”

“There were lots of them at the club,” Nick said. 

“They’re not going to last for a lifetime,” Judy said. “Most of them aren’t going to last for a night.” Nick inclined his head to show it was a fair point. “I don’t know, I feel like what my parents want for me is something that’s long-term, you know? Something committed. That isn’t just a fling.”

“Like… this is a fling,” Nick said with a strange expression on his face.

“Yeah!” Judy said. “I mean, you’re great.” She smiled, remembering some of the greatest hits of the previous night and, for that matter, afternoon. “So great. Really, amazingly, wonderfully great. But we’re not going to marry and have kittens or anything. That would be ridiculous.”

“Cubs,” Nick said distantly. 

“What?”

“Fox children are called cubs,” Nick said.

“I think we’d be able to compromise on ‘kits’ -- I mean, if we were going to do this, which we aren’t, because it would be insane,” Judy said. 

“Yeah,” Nick said. “Insane.”

“Could we even adopt?” Judy asked. “A fox/rabbit couple? I’m pretty sure that’s not legal. And ZPD PR is overworked already with the complaints about having a fox on staff, I can’t imagine how hard they’d have to work if they had an interspecies couple. And I don’t even want to know what my parents would think.”

“That’s true,” Nick said, still weirdly distant. “The stigma on an interspecies couple is really heavy. It’s a lot easier to be with someone of your own species.”

“And for good reason,” Judy said. “I mean, in Zootopia anyone can be anything-- but you still understand members of your own species the best. I mean, remember how long it took us to get through my biases about predators and your biases about prey? You wouldn’t want to get married to someone who was carrying fox repellant the first time they met you.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Nick said. 

“What’s the thing you were going to say?” Judy asked.

“Um,” Nick said, “just that I really like and value this as the completely and one hundred percent casual thing that it is, and I’m so glad that we’re on the same page that there aren’t going to be any feelings or marriage and kits or anything.”

Judy grinned. “Me too. It’s so nice not to have to worry about that stuff. It’s great that we have such a strong friendship that we can have sex and it doesn’t really mean anything.”

“Yep,” Nick said. The weird distance had entered his voice again. 

It was wonderful to be finally communicating about their expectations, instead of continually being in denial. Judy felt like she was really growing as a person and learning to acknowledge aspects of her personality she’d found hard to deal with before. And it wasn’t like she’d expected anything from Nick. How could she? That would be ridiculous. Judy had been a recent and enthusiastic convert to the merits of interspecies sex, but you couldn’t have a relationship with a person of a different species. Nick was her partner, her lover, and most importantly her friend, but he would never play the same role in her life that her father did in her mother’s, and that was exactly the way it should be. 

The emotion she felt right now was probably happiness. It didn’t feel a whole lot like the way happiness usually felt to Judy-- the click when she finally figured out who did it, the electricity dancing across her skin when she closed the case, the warmth in her stomach when Chief Bogo gave out one of his rare nods of approval, the excitement of setting a personal record in the gym-- but maybe that’s just because all her sources of happiness were related to work. Probably relationship happiness felt different. In fact, it seemed to feel weirdly like unhappiness, but maybe she just needed to learn to appreciate it. 

“About your parents,” Nick said. It looked like he was gearing up for a long speech. Judy settled back to listen. “I think they’re right that… your life is not complete without somebody by your side to stay with you.” Ugh, Judy thought, everyone agrees with my parents. “But you’re right too. You’re not going to meet the right rabbit and give up being a cop and have two hundred kittens, because the right rabbit wouldn’t want you to give up being a cop and have two hundred kittens. He would love you for who you are, and being the first bunny cop is a huge part of who you are. And he would want you to be happy, and I know and you know you’re not going to be happy unless you can protect and serve.” 

“Thanks,” Judy said. “That really makes me feel better.” She smiled. “When I meet the right rabbit, he’ll understand how important my work is to me. Like you do.”

Nick smiled, but there was a tightness around his eyes. “Yeah. Like me.”

“You... don’t have someone by your side to stay with you,” Judy said. “Unless you’re the one with the secret fiance you’re not telling me about.”

“No, I don’t,” Nick said.

“I’m sorry,” Judy said. She held his paws. “I’m sure you’ll find the right vixen eventually.”

“That is… almost completely certain,” Nick said. 

“See, there’s the spirit!” Judy said, impressed by his confidence. Well, he always had been charming. 

“I, uh, like you a lot,” NIck said. “Just so we’re clear.”

Judy nodded. 

“I want you to have everything you want.” NIck was staring at the floor, not meeting her eyes. “I really do want you to be happy.”

It was surprisingly earnest. She half-expected him to be leading up to some elaborate pun. 

“You don’t want to grow old alone, Carrots,” Nick said. “Take it from someone who’s doing it, it sucks.”

“You’re not old,” Judy said. Nick’s melancholy wasn’t good for him, she knew, and she had one way to cheer him up. “Your fur hasn’t even started to go grey.”

Nick grinned; he seemed relieved by the sudden veer away from the Nick Is Inexplicably Sad Show. “I dye it.”

“You can still keep going after I’m all tuckered out.”

“Oh, can I?” Nick said. His voice suddenly took on a light, teasing air. “I’ll have you know that you are being so cruel and unkind to your old grandpa here, who is probably going to have to walk with a cane when you’re done with me--”

“Only so you can hit me with it.”

“If I can move my tired geriatric arms, that is.”

Judy critically assessed the situation. “You are wearing entirely too many clothes.”

“All I’m wearing is this towel.”

“Like I said…”

\--

Things were different after that conversation. They weren’t different in any obvious way, mind you. As strange as it was for Judy to think about, it was like what was different was precisely how much was the same. It was almost as if Nick was being conscientious to make sure that everything was exactly the way it used to be: his touching, his bickering, his casual affection, even the way his voice broke at the moment of orgasm. But they were… calculated, in a way they hadn’t been before. As if Nick were thinking, now, about how to have the relationship they wanted, rather than being moved by impulse and raw desire. 

Judy supposed this was a natural outcome of talking about your feelings. Once you were aware of them you started thinking “is this the way I’m supposed to be doing it? Is this in line with the relationship we’d talked about?” It was probably normal. Maybe they would adjust back to the way things were once he was more comfortable, or maybe this was the way things would be forever and she could only get them to be the wonderful way they were before by being in utter denial about the fact that she wanted to bang Nick like a screen door in a hurricane. She wouldn’t know. It wasn’t like she’d had wild flings with anybody but Nick before. 

Still, she missed the way things were before. She had liked how un-self-conscious Nick was about getting close. 

\--

Judy did situps on her bedroom floor alone. “One hundred… one hundred and one… one hundred and two…” Nick was going for a jog “because you are a terrible influence on me, Carrots, and I want to live long enough to make sure you’ll continue to be a terrible influence for another couple decades.” As she worked out, her mind wandered (as it often did) to the tremendously interesting topic of sex with Nick. After going through the ordinary reflections about the talent of his fingers and the attractiveness of the way he gasped when she moved her mouth just right, she came to the conclusion that the best part about vacationing with Nick wasn’t the sex.

The sex was a very good part. It was definitely at least fourth on the list, probably third. But the mind-blowing orgasms were, strangely enough, not her favorite thing about this vacation. 

Nick had only been back to his apartment once to pick up toothpaste and deodorant. It was almost as if they were living together. And there was something… comfortable about living with him. Snuggling a little closer to him in the middle of the night and falling back asleep without ever really waking up. Using the smell of breakfast in the morning as an alarm clock (Nick had started cooking for her because “I would have to have heart of stone to let you keep living in the way you’re living, Carrots”). Talking about nothing while they folded laundry or did the dishes. Bickering about whose turn it was to choose the movie (Nick’s tastes ran to the flashy and full of explosives, while Judy liked a mystery she could solve along with the hero). 

It wasn’t that big a deal when she thought about it. It wasn’t romantic the way that romance was in books, grand gestures and heroic self-sacrifice. It was like she had Nick stitched into every aspect of her life, woven into every moment from her waking to her sleeping. 

She was noticing it now particularly because it was gone, or at least lessened, by the fact that they’d talked about the relationship. Nick seemed much more aware now that this was temporary, that they weren’t living together really; he seemed much more careful about keeping within the boundaries of a friendship-with-sex-on-top. When she hadn’t had it, she hadn’t known to miss it; now that she had experienced it, it left an ache in her heart when she thought about how it was gone, and when she thought about the vacation ending the ache filled her whole entire body and she had to lie on the floor and not move and wait for it to go away, which was a real impediment to her getting her reps in. 

She wanted to… Judy explored this thought carefully, wondering where it would lead… she didn’t want it to stop. 

In fact, she wanted to keep living with him, officially, after the vacation was over. 

In fact, she wanted to continue living with him for the rest of her life. 

In fact, she wanted to marry him and have kits and fuck all the stigma in an interspecies relationship because if she married him she would have Nick, her Nick, and they could fold laundry together every week for the rest of their lives and that sounded so small and petty but suddenly it was the most important thing in the world. 

“Shit,” Judy said to an empty room. “I’m in love with him.”

“Finally she notices!” Pronk said. 

“You’re not supposed to be the one rooting for this relationship,” Bucky said. “Aren’t you going to say something about it being sick?”

“To be honest,” Pronk said, “at this point it was just getting ridiculous.”

But Judy was not listening to the neighbors’ commentary. She reeled and whispered it to herself again. “I’m in love with him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author has never actually been to a nightclub and apologizes for any inaccuracies. 
> 
> Author also wishes to apologize for the random pro-sex-work rant in the middle of their fic. In their defense, there are two meanings of the word 'hustler'.
> 
> Author absolutely refuses to apologize for their treatment of Nick.


	3. Chapter 3

Judy was, obviously, not really in love with Nick.

But, as much as she hated to admit it, her parents had been right. It wasn’t enough just to solve crimes. She needed someone to love. And since she’d been so long without someone to love, her brain had started fixating on a completely inappropriate person: her partner and platonic friend, Nick Wilde.

It was perfectly natural-- when you live with someone and spend a lot of time having earth-shattering sex with them, some part of you naturally starts thinking about them like they’re actually someone you might want to marry-- but it was a sign that something was wrong. Like how some mammals who didn’t get enough iron got cravings for ice! It was possible for your body to want something that was totally wrong for you as a sign that you actually had to fix some completely different problem. That was definitely what was going on here.

Judy probably should have called off the whole thing. But when Nick got back from his run he was grinning and his eyes were half-lidded from tiredness and he said “hey, Carrots, got that eight-pack yet?” in the most charming tone of voice and Judy wanted to chew metaphorical ice now, just for a little bit, just for a while.

She could deal with it after the vacation, right? It was a clear line of demarcation. She could have one more week of pretending, and then she’d go out and find a rabbit to marry like a grownup and she was pretty sure that that would sound more appetizing once she’d started to actually do it. Right? Right.

Her desire to pretend that she really was in love with Nick was not remotely influenced by the way Nick stripped off his shirt and collapsed on the bed, nor by the very intriguing vibrating thing she’d found in his bag. Nope. Not at all. Nothing to do with it.

\--

On the day Judy got back to work she called her parents and asked for a number, and a week later, with trepidation, Judy approached the restaurant where Timothy was waiting.

“Bit of an awkward way to meet, right?” Timothy asked as she sat down. “Our parents and all.”

“Yeah,” Judy said.

He was nice enough, she thought. His dark eyes were striking against his pure white fur; his ears were a lovely shade of pink; his nose twitched a little bit in amusement. His appearance was certainly not objectionable. One might even say it was attractive. And after all, you did learn to love someone over time. The first time she saw Nick she’d thought he was sketchy and a little bit scary. It was only once they were friends that she’d started to see the light dancing in his eyes and the sardonic twist of his smile, and only once they’d kissed that she’d recognized--

She wasn’t supposed to think about Nick. With effort, she wrenched her thoughts back so that they were about Timothy.

“I’m so busy with work it’s hard to find time to meet someone who is capable of using words of more than one syllable,” Timothy said. “I imagine you have the same problem, being the first bunny cop and all? You’ve got long hours and not exactly a lot of eligible rabbit coworkers.”

“Um. Yes. Definitely. I am having a lot of trouble meeting people,” Judy said, hoping that he didn’t figure out from her facial expression that her problem was, well, exactly the opposite of that. To be fair, both the problem she had and the problem he thought she had did result from a shortage of eligible rabbits. So it wasn’t exactly like she was lying.

“I just want to say,” Timothy said, leaning forward slightly in his chair, “that it’s really exciting that I’m getting to meet you, much less go out on a date with you. I’ve been following your news coverage for ages.”

“Really?” Judy asked, taken aback.

“Really,” Timothy said. “I hope you won’t think I’m weird if I say that you were kind of an inspiration to me.” His smile was, as much as Judy hated to admit it, kind of endearing. “The Zootopia police force represents all animals, and it’s about time that it include all animals. How can a rhino provide culturally competent policing to a mouse? A bull to a bunny?”

“Exactly!” Judy said. “Did you know that one of the biggest crime bosses in Zootopia is a shrew? It’s so hard for us to police rodent communities, because every one of our cops is at least ten times their size. A lot of these staffing decisions are frankly short-sighted and based on outdated assumptions about what species are capable of crime.”

“It doesn’t surprise me,” Timothy said. “And your partner Nick is really great too.” He looked earnest. “People say ‘oh, those foxes are all criminals, that’s why they shouldn’t be police,’ but frankly that’s exactly why they should be police! How can you expect to police foxes if your cops don’t understand fox communities? And, frankly, a lot of young foxes do take up lives of crime, and--”

“You’re glad he’s a role model for fox cubs? Show them that they don’t have to be criminals?” Judy asked. A little cringeworthy speciesism, but she was sure she could talk some sense into him before he met Nick. After all, she had been worse before the Savage Incident, and even her parents had started to come around.

“No,” Timothy said, “frankly, cubs already know how much they’re capable of. Nick is a model for everyone else. A lot of foxes take up crime because of speciesist stereotyping driving them out of professions that aren’t illegal. A lot of regressive jerks need to be shown that foxes are just as good as anyone else.”

Judy eyed him with a new respect.

“That’s part of why I run the daycare,” Timothy said. “A lot of these viewpoints are set when mammals are kittens. My daycare is species-inclusive, which means that predators and prey get to see each other as animals first, not as species labels. It teaches them that--”

“That in Zootopia anyone can be anything?” Judy asked.

“Yeah!” Timothy seemed to notice that he had been ranting. “Sorry,” he said shyly. “I know I shouldn’t get political on the first date.”

“No, I like it,” Judy said.

“You’re my kind of doe,” Timothy said. “Maybe I’ll get to meet Nick one of these days.”

“He’d like you,” Judy said.

He really would, but not in the way Timothy thought.

She was thinking about what Nick had said. She wouldn’t have to quit policing for the right rabbit, because the right rabbit wouldn’t want her to. Looking into Timothy’s dark eyes, she wondered if Nick had been prophetic when he said that, if Timothy were the right rabbit after all.

\--

Judy wasn’t lying to Nick exactly.

Of course, she usually talked to him about everything she did. If this were a normal situation, there was no way she wouldn’t spend hours dissecting Timothy’s text messages and listening to Nick point out every way Timothy wasn’t good enough for his Judy but that if she felt like she had to settle for such an obviously inferior man he was not going to question her poor judgment and lack of taste.

But whenever she opened her mouth to try to say the words-- I met a bunny, he’s kind, I think you might like him, he runs a daycare, I don’t have feelings for him yet but there’s potential maybe possibly-- something stopped her throat. She didn’t think there was anything wrong with what she was doing. Hadn’t they had that discussion? Hadn’t they both agreed it was just friends having sex? And she and Timothy had yet to discuss becoming exclusive; for all she knew he had a dozen bunnies (or for that matter foxes) on speed dial.

“She’s trying to have her bunny,” Pronk said gloomily, “and eat her perverted sex too.”

“I am pretty certain,” Bucky said, “you don’t eat perverted sex.”

“Eating is often involved in perverted sex,” Pronk said.

“Involved, sure,” Bucky said, “but you don’t eat the sex itself. It’s not a physical object. It can’t be eaten.”

“It was a metaphor,” Pronk said.

Judy put on headphones and cranked Gazelle all the way up.

Maybe if she lost her hearing by the time she was thirty she wouldn’t have to hear her next-door neighbors anymore. And PR would probably like it if she were a twofer. First Deaf bunny cop. She’d be so busy signing autographs and kissing babies that she wouldn’t have to solve crimes ever again, and that’d give her a lot of spare time to figure out her romantic drama.

\--

“You can’t kiss me here!” Judy said, scandalized.

“Yes, I can,” Nick said, pressing her into the wall of the police station’s alley, his snout near her ear.

“The security cameras--”

Nick laughed, and Judy could feel it rumbling through her entire body. “Checked that the first time I came into this building, Carrots, there’s a blind spot here.”

“What if someone walks by?” Admittedly, pressed into the wall by a fox wasn’t that much less of a compromising position...

Nick’s grin was roguish. “Doesn’t that make it more fun?”

Judy laughed. “All right.” And she kissed him, and all her fur stood on end, and for a moment she felt like there was no past or future, like she would be standing with her back against a sun-drenched alley wall for the rest of time.

\--

She woke up in the middle of the night sick with guilt and longing, and she reached out to the other side of her empty bed for Nick. “Timothy,” she told herself firmly, “I’m reaching out for Timothy.” But night had a way of making stark the pretty lies she told herself, and she couldn’t make herself believe what had seemed so plausible in the day. She missed Nick. She loved him. And when she woke up without him in her bed, she felt alone.

Eventually she dropped back to sleep. Her dreams were restless and unsatisfying.

\--

Timothy was a perfect gentleman.

He remembered what kind of music she liked. He listened avidly to her talking about policing, even when she was talking about details of regulations that even Nick got tired of. (To be fair, Nick was almost solely interested in regulations when he had some angle to exploit them.) He had a way of talking about the daycare that made stories that would bore her to tears instead have her in stitches, and when he talked about it his eyes lit up with obvious passion. And he cared a lot about speciesism.

“I was arrested once, you know,” he said as they walked after a particularly large and excessively carrot-themed dinner.

“You were?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I was protesting the rezoning of a square foot of Little Rodentia. Apparently they thought it wasn’t a big deal because ‘it was only a square foot.’” He made air quotes.

“That’s absurd,” Judy said, “by relative size it’s as if they rezoned half of the Nocturnal District--.”

“Which is what I was shouting at the mayor when I was arrested,” Timothy said.

“They arrested you for shouting at the mayor?” Judy asked.

“Well,” Timothy said, “to be completely fair to the ZPD, I was in his house.”

Judy was impressed in spite of herself. She was not technically supposed to condone trespassing, but there was something impressive about someone who would make such sacrifices for something he believed in-- the way that she’d made huge sacrifices to become a bunny cop.

“They let a bad boy like you take care of kids?” she said jokingly.

“I hope you’re not going to reject me because of my dark and troubled past,” he said, the intonation in his voice eerily similar to Nick’s when he was being flippant about one of his insecurities.

Judy snorted.

“What?” Timothy said.

“Nothing,” Judy said. “You just sound like… one of my friends.”

“Must be a nice friend,” Timothy said, “if they sound like me. Should I be jealous?” and it sounded like Nick, it could have been something Nick had said if he’d finished the sentence with ‘Carrots’, and Judy spent an insane moment wondering if she could convince Timothy that ‘Carrots’ was a perfectly good nickname for a bunny to have for another bunny.

“No,” Judy said, “you shouldn’t be jealous.” Her nose twitched. She wasn’t technically lying, right? Technically speaking, they hadn’t made an agreement, and technically speaking she was going to break up with Nick as soon as Timothy said the word, and technically speaking Nick was a fox and how could a fox provide any competition at all for a bunny because you couldn’t marry someone of a different species! How could that even work?

Judy was vaguely aware that her internal monologue sounded exactly like Duke Weaselton last time she arrested him. But they hadn’t been able to arrest Duke Weaselton for anything and shouldn’t that count for something?

They stopped under a streetlight. Timothy reached out and took her paw. Judy didn’t feel anything. It wasn’t like Nick: when he held her paw, she felt safe and secure and like she belonged somewhere and was loved. Well, nowadays every casual contact sent a surge of electricity through her, but that was a normal part of having had sex with someone (Judy assumed, it wasn’t like she’d ever seen either of the two other people she’d had sex with twice).

Maybe it took time. Maybe it was a mistake to assume that she needed her romantic partner to make her feel safe and secure every time he held her hand.

Timothy kissed her then, under that streetlight, and Judy had an involuntary flashback to kissing Nick in the alleyway. It had felt perfect. Kissing Timothy was… nothing. Just the sensation of lips touching lips, physical contact as impersonal as brushing hands with the barista when she collected her coffee. Perhaps, if Judy were completely honest, the kiss was a little bit slimy.

Nick had never been slimy. Or if he was, then she had been so distracted by how amazing it was to be near to him that she had never noticed.

She liked Timothy more, knowing that he’d been arrested. It made him more like Nick. Judy tried to tell herself that it was just her type. Lots of mammals liked the bad boy, and it wasn’t like she’d ever fallen for anyone besides Nick, so for all she knew good-hearted people with a criminal history were her thing. Opposites attract, right? The cop goes for the criminal?

She could hear Bucky’s voice inside her head: _honestly, she’s getting less and less convincing._

\--

When Judy finally told Nick, the words came out all at once.

“I literally have no idea what you just said,” Nick said, “so I am going to assume you’re complimenting me and say ‘thank you.’”

“I met someone else,” Judy said.

Nick stiffened. “Oh.”

“He’s-- nice?” Judy said uncertainly. “He runs a daycare. He cares a lot about speciesism.”

“That’s good,” Nick said. “It’s important to find someone who shares your values.” He was talking sort of distantly, as if his mouth were moving without his brain having a whole lot of input.

“Yeah,” Judy said, “he criticized speciesism against foxes without me having to educate him about it, which was a real selling point.”

“Rabbit?” Nick asked.

“Obviously,” Judy said. There was a snort from next door.

The tips of Nick’s ears were drooping, but his smile was as casual as ever. “So tell me about him. I’ll see if he’s worth my Judy.” The tone of Nick’s voice implied that this task would involve at least owning a jet plane, and probably the possession of at least two islands.

“Well, he’s very supportive of my career,” Judy said. “If we have kittens, he’s already said that he’s going to be the one to raise them so I can focus on reaching my dreams with the ZPD.”

“I’m glad you’ve gotten all that sorted out already,” Nick said, his voice a little too tight. “It sounds like you’re really serious about this guy. Why is this the first I’ve heard of him? I thought we talked about everything, Carrots.”

“I didn’t want to bore you with the details unless it became… serious.” Judy’s excuse sounded lame even to her.

But Nick didn’t seem to want to call her on it. “You know,” he said, “since it’s getting serious and all, I still have a lot of my old contacts. If you want, I can call in a few favors, get some guys to… encourage him to treat you right.”

“Cops aren’t allowed to do that!” Judy said.

“There are lots of things cops aren’t allowed to do,” Nick said, “most of which, for some reason, they wind up doing anyway.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be against bad cops?”

“This is not being a bad cop!” Nick said. “This is being an excellent cop! I am protecting and serving the Zootopian public, specifically, those portions of the public whose bedroom I currently happen to be in.”

“Speaking of bedrooms,” Judy said, “we’re… going to have to stop doing this.”

Nick’s ears were flat against his head. “Stop doing what?”

“Sex,” Judy said. “It… wasn’t cheating before, Timothy and I weren’t exclusive or anything, but we’re becoming more serious and... I don’t want to go back on my promises. Or lie.”

“That’s true,” Nick said. “You’ve always been very loyal and honest to those you care about.”

“I’m glad you’re so understanding,” Judy said, “you’re really the best friend a mammal could ever have.”

“Judy,” Nick said, “whatever happens with whatshisface--”

“--Timothy--”

“Whatever,” Nick said dismissively. “I want you to know that… that I am so glad to have been your friend. Carrots, I don’t want to get all mushy, but… you’re probably the best thing that has happened to me in my entire life.”

Judy felt a lump in her throat. “Me too,” she said. “No matter what happens with me and Timothy, you’re always going to be my partner.”

Nick eyed Judy suspiciously. “Were you recording that?”

Judy laughed. “Never,” she said.

A heartbeat passed.

“So,” Nick said. “Uh. I guess I should… leave? Now?”

Judy’s pulse was racing. “I haven’t… technically talked to Timothy about exclusivity yet,” she said.

Nick tilted his head. “Go on.”

“One last time,” Judy said. “Before Timothy. I.” She frowned, a still small voice inside of her informing her that this was a terrible idea, but she felt compelled. “I want to have a chance to say goodbye to you.”

Nick paused for a moment, as if he were thinking about it, and then he ran a gentle hand along her cheek. “One last time,” he said, and kissed her.

Although it was impossible, it felt almost as if her heart was breaking.

\--

Having sex with Nick hadn’t ruined their friendship, and frankly Judy had grown optimistic about their friendship being able to overcome all obstacles. But she’d spoken too soon. Having sex might not have hurt their relationship, but stopping having sex did.

Although he tried to keep his ears perky where Judy could see, Judy had known him long enough to know that every time she was glancing across the room or contemplating her coffeecup his ears were drooping. They used to get in the office when the sun rose, and leave when Chief Bogo started making disgusted noises about how he wasn’t going to pay any overtime so don’t be getting any bright ideas; now, Nick arrived at the office at 9am on the dot and left precisely at five. After the first few days, Nick kept the conversation primarily to pleasantries and factual discussions of their cases; Judy, assuming he was just taking the transition hard, followed his lead. But it didn’t get better, and even the smallest overture got shut down.

“I was watching Claw and Order last night--” Judy said.

“I’m busy, Judy,” he said.

He never visited her at her apartment anymore. Judy had once thought her apartment was small and cramped; now it seemed vast and empty, and she wondered how she had ever thought that she could fill it with one person.

“Ha, I knew it, I knew she was going to play Leopard Cohen next,” Pronk said. “Do you think she knows any of his songs other than Hallelujah?”

“Be nice,” Bucky said. “She’s heartbroken.”

“You’re just sad because you bet on Evanescents,” Pronk said.

“Be that as it may,” Bucky said, “she lost a lot more than a lover. She lost a friend.”

“This is what happens when you start having perverted sex,” Pronk said. “Friendships fall apart. Depression sets in. The entire discography of Alioness Morisette is listened to.”

“Technically speaking,” Bucky said, “everything was going fine until she started dating a rabbit and stopped having perverted sex. So I think the real lesson here is that no one should pay any attention to regressive attitudes like yours.”

“To be honest,” Pronk said, “the breakup is worse than the sex. At least during the sex somebody was happy. Not me, mind you, I was miserable. But Judy was happy and I feel like that counts for something.”

“You like Leopard Cohen,” Bucky said.

“Once,” Pronk said. “I like Leopard Cohen once. I do not like three hours straight of Leopard Cohen which, may I remind you, is what we were subjected to last night. Come on, Judy, Prance Me To The End Of Love is great! At least listen to a different song… Or not. Not is good too.”

“Bet you she gets sick of it after two hours this time,” Bucky said.

“You’re on.”

Judy stared at the ceiling. She could already tell that Bucky was going to lose his money. Today, she felt, was going to be a four-hours-of-Leopard-Cohen day. But first, she paused the music and took out her recorder.

“Finally, a break!” Pronk said.

Judy turned on a random recording of Nick, something from when they were goofing around. “I love you, Carrots,” the recording said. She pressed a button; the recorder whirred, played it again.

“...Can we go back to Leopard Cohen now?” Pronk asked. “This is unbearable. I am going to start crying.”

“Please,” Bucky added.

\--

“I can’t do this anymore,” Nick said.

“What, the filing?” Judy said. “Well, give it to me, I’ll take care of it. We have to finish it by the end of the day, but if you’ll swing by and pick up some coffee for me I’d be happy to push through--”

“No, not the fucking filing,” Nick said. “This. Our partnership. I can’t do it anymore. I thought I could, and I couldn’t, and I’m sorry.”

“I noticed you’ve been… kind of under the weather, lately,” Judy said. She wasn’t sure of the right way to phrase it. She figured “miserable and you won’t talk to me and what did I do wrong, Nick, I miss you” might be a little tactless.

“I’m glad that you can notice something, I was beginning to wonder,” Nick said, and as sad as he was, as much as it wrenched Judy’s heart to hear him say that he couldn’t be a part of their partnership anymore, mostly Judy was just grateful, pathetically grateful, that Nick was talking to her again.

“What’s wrong?” Judy asked, putting the filing aside. The records office could just deal with none of Nick and Judy’s reports being on time today.

“Carrots,” Nick said, and Judy’s heart leapt in her chest hearing him call her ‘Carrots’ again, “I don’t think you understand how important you are to me. I… didn’t really have people who cared about me, before you. I didn’t have a purpose in life. I was going nowhere. I didn’t see anywhere past the next hustle, the next fuck, the next dollar. And… you were the first person to see some good in me. You were prey, you had fox repellent for fuck’s sake, but you didn’t just see a crafty untrustworthy fox. You saw Nick. And when we kissed, it felt like there was something right in this stupid fucking world for once. I guess what I’m trying to say is… I love you.”

Oh.

When Judy was a kitten, she used to like puzzles: there was the moment when you put in the right piece and it clicked, a bunch of scattered patches of blue and white became a sky, with the fields spread out below them. When she was older, she discovered that solving crimes worked the same way: you chewed over them like a cow with its cud until finally you found the secret, the one thing that made the entire picture come together, and then fitting the rest of the pieces together was easy.

She was having a moment like that now. Nick loved her. It was the missing piece from her puzzle, the clue that allowed her to solve the crime. Whatever their relationship had been to her, to him it had been love. And when she met Timothy… she broke his heart.

She’d hurt the person who was most important to her in the world.

“I told you about finding the right rabbit,” Nick said, his words stumbling over each other in his haste to get them out, “but the thing is… there’s no such thing as the right vixen for me. The mammal for me is you. It has always been you.”

Judy stared at her desk. The can of pens seemed safe. The can of pens wasn’t going to do anything unexpected like confess its love to her. That was the security that Judy needed right now.

“The thing I want most in the world is for you to be happy,” Nick said, “and I know I can’t make you happy. I can’t give you kittens. Your parents aren’t going to approve of me. We’re never going to be normal, and we’re probably going to be a PR disaster for the ZPD, and we’re probably not even going to be able to hold paws in public without someone calling us nasty names.”

Judy didn’t know what she wanted to say. Part of her, the part that sounded like her mom and dad, was agreeing-- she wanted kittens and respectability, she didn’t want to throw everything away on a whim of her heart. A wild part of her wanted agree to anything-- to marriage, to kittens, to running away from Zootopia and taking up a life on the sea and singing shanties while they held hands and stared into each other’s eyes-- as long as it meant that Nick would be okay and happy and stop having that note of sadness in his voice that made her heart shatter. And a huge part of her wanted to forget politics, forget thinking about the future, and just hold Nick and kiss him and never let him go.

Instead, she sat paralyzed. She didn’t say a word. She felt certain that if she tried to talk her voice would croak like a frog.

“And… it’s okay for you to want not to have to deal with that,” Nick said. “I want you to get the things you want, because I love you. But I can’t stand here talking to you and pretending that I don’t love you, that I’ve never been anything more than your partner or your friend. I can’t watch someone else get to spend Sunday mornings with you and comfort you when you cry and, and get buried next to you when you’re old and everything else I wanted, and pretend that I’m okay with that. I’m sorry, Carrots. There’s a lot I would do to be able to keep seeing your face. But I’m not a romance novel hero. I can’t give up everything for love. In fact, the amount of things I’m willing to give up for love is, it turns out, remarkably limited.”

“You love me,” Judy said. She couldn’t manage to look at him. She didn’t know what she was feeling. If she’d had a thousand hours of therapy to sort through only the feelings she felt in that moment, she was pretty sure she would only be able to scratch the surface of what she was feeling.

“And it’s been made acutely clear to me in the last few weeks,” Nick said, “that you can’t love me as much as I love you. It’s okay. I don’t… blame you. And if I were stronger, better, I would be able to stand it. But in spite of how much faith you had in me. I’m just a selfish ruthless fox after all.” His usual roguish smile was without humor. “Thank you, Judy. I… that isn’t meant to be cruel. I mean it sincerely. Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for caring about me. Thank you for showing me what it’s like to have a future. I’m going to miss it. You.” He shook his head, and Judy wanted to grab him and kiss all his sadness away. “I’m not looking forward to going back to only caring about the next hustle.”

The sentence “you don’t have to” died in her mouth.

“I’m going to go to Chief Bogo and ask to be reassigned,” Nick said. “Think of me fondly now and again, and name one of your kittens after me, okay?”

“Nick, wait,” Judy said.

“Save it, Carrots,” Nick said, and as she looked at his retreating back Judy felt dread that she had just heard him call her ‘Carrots’ for the last time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to thank the Decemberists, who provided the soundtrack for the writing of this chapter.


	4. Chapter 4

A knock came at her door. She opened it to discover an iPod with a cheery note on it: “FROM YOUR NEIGHBORS-- PLEASE LISTEN TO SOME NEW MUSIC. <3”

“Or at least use headphones!” Pronk shouted from his apartment next door. Judy wondered how fast he’d run to be back there before she picked it up, then decided that probably the actual problem was that she was moving so slow. It felt like she was swimming through Jello these days. 

“We put some great songs on this one,” Bucky said. “Miranda Lambert, Gloria Neighnor, The Mammal League… lots of different musicians! For whatever style of music you like! And most importantly many, many different songs, so you will never again have to listen to the same one more than three times in a row.”

“We put in Leopard Cohen’s entire discography,” Pronk said. 

“Because we know you like him! Or at least that one song by him! And we’re certain you’d like more if you gave him a chance,” Bucky said. 

“I have recently become aware of how entry-level Judy’s taste is,” Pronk said. “Acutely aware. I feel like the repetition wouldn’t be such a problem if she at least liked the Dismemberists.”

“Well, maybe this breakup will be a great opportunity to expose her to some new tunes,” Bucky said optimistically. 

“...Is that Sting Me To Life again?” Pronk asked. 

“It is no longer 2008!” Bucky said. “You are not making an AMV! Please stop!”

Judy listened to it three more times anyway. 

\--

She had to get over Nick eventually, right?

It was normal to be sad after you-- well, she might as well be honest about it-- after you broke up with someone. Nick had been such an integral part of the fabric of her life for years, and now she was never going to see him again except in passing in the halls. (She wondered if he would ever stop freezing up when he saw her. She wondered if he were sad, if he were suffering too, or whether he was happy to no longer be next to her constantly reminded of what he could never have, and which one she wanted to be true.)

But it was for the best. You can love someone very much and they’re not the right person for you. For instance, if they happened to be a fox while you were a bunny. That would be a really obvious reason why someone wouldn’t be good for you. 

The feeling in her heart was like an injury healing: the pain was the pain of bones knitting together, of muscles repairing themselves. It hurt now, but it was all the process of getting better, and soon she wouldn’t even remember what it felt like.

Or at least that’s what Judy tried to tell herself. Mostly the pain just hurt. It didn’t feel like healing at all. 

It was hard to do anything when she felt like this. She lay in bed. She went to work and tried to work, but it was increasingly obvious that they were keeping anything really important out of her hands, leaving her with nothing but busywork. In the old days, she would have been offended. Now, she was pathetically grateful. She made stupid, lazy mistakes in her paperwork, and corrected them, and discovered that the correction was a mistake as well. It felt like she was thinking through a layer of gray fog.

She missed him. And she couldn’t have complex feelings anymore about interspecies relationships and social stigma and not really belonging together and it all being for the best: she missed him and she wanted him to come back and there was nothing she wanted more than to open the door and see Nick with a takeout box of Panda Express in his hand saying “you believed me! You totally believed me! You believed that I was in love with you! Man, I am going to be making fun of you about this for years. Couldn’t bear to let you suffer anymore, though, it was getting to not be very funny. I’m not a sadist. Scoot over, I saw this great show on Nutflix.”

But no matter how much she stared at the door, it stayed closed, and she knew it wasn’t a joke.

\--

“Sir?” Judy said, “you asked to see me?”

Chief Bogo gestured to the chair in front of his desk. “Sit down, Hopps,” he said. She did, shifting around a little. She never stopped feeling awkwardly small in that seat.

“So, I’ve noticed that Wilde asked to be reassigned,” Chief Bogo said, “and now both of you are walking around like cubs at Christmas who discovered that Santa Claws filled their stockings with coal.”

Judy considered attempting to deny that she was sad, but concluded that this was too obviously untrue to pass muster. “Sir, I don’t think our performance has been impaired,” she said instead. 

“You missed two days last week,” Chief Bogo said. “You know how long it’s been since you’ve missed a day?”

“Not off the top of my head, sir,” Judy said. 

“The Great Flu Epidemic of ‘15,” Chief Bogo said. “You came to work and puked all over your desk, the floor, and the hooves of an innocent horse who was coming to report their bicycle stolen. We tried to make you take two days off and you bargained it down to an afternoon.”

“Not my finest hour, sir,” Judy said. 

“And now you miss two days in a week, because you’re ‘not feeling well’?” Chief Bogo said. “And, worse, Wilde has completely stopped sending memos to HR or Internal Affairs. There isn’t even an anonymous complaint that doesn’t seem to be his doing but that has his paws all over it. Vice is shitting its collective pants wondering what he’s got cooking, and all I can say to comfort them is that he seems to be busy staring sadly at vegetables.” That last word was laden with sarcastic contempt.

“Sir, I can explain--”

“Can it, Hopps,” Chief Bogo said. “Words cannot express how little I care about your and Wilde’s personal life. But I seem to have lost two of my best people to it, which means I suddenly have to. I am finding myself with opinions about you two’s personal life. I don’t like having to care about things, Hopps.”

“I understand that, sir.”

“Figure it out, Hopps,” Chief Bogo said. “I need you two solving crimes, not moping around like the second prettiest girl at the prom. Dismissed.”

\--

“You know how back when they’d broken up but before Nick had confessed his love for her I said this was unbearable?” Pronk said. 

“Yes,” Bucky said. 

“I was wrong,” Pronk said. “I was so colossally wrong. I look back with nostalgia on the halcyon days of yore, in which I did not even know how much I had to be grateful for. That was not unbearable. It was eminently bearable. The yoke was easy and the burden was light.” He paused for effect. “This. This is unbearable.”

“I know it’s our thing to argue constantly,” Bucky said, “but I’m pretty much going to have to agree with you.”

“And the worst part,” Pronk said, “the worst part, is that in two days I am going to be in depths of misery which mammalkind has yet to explore and I will say to myself ‘how could I have ever imagined that that was unbearable? For, lo, the burden I currently carry is twice the weight. What I would give to suffer only as little as I’d suffered then!’”

“That’s… pretty much the long and short of it, yeah,” Bucky said. 

“He’s right, you know,” the neighbor to Judy’s left said. “At this point you are depressing literally the entire floor.”

“Since when do you guys talk?” Judy asked the left wall.

“Yeah!” Pronk said. “Being the obnoxious commentary is our job, not your job.”

“Judy has stopped exercising and started eating sweets for three meals a day,” the left-hand-side neighbor said. “I think we’re all behaving out-of-character nowadays.”

“I have an idea,” Bucky said. “We get some antidepressants. We make a pie. We bake the antidepressants into the pie. She eats the pie and, boom, she feels better and we get to stop taking bets about how long she’s sleeping for.”

“I swear she’s going to manage a whole sixteen hours on Saturday,” Pronk said. 

“No way,” Bucky said. “That isn’t physiologically possible.”

“She’s determined,” Pronk said. 

“Yeah, I’m with Pronk,” the left-hand-side neighbor said, apparently emboldened now that she’d made her first comment about Judy by shouting through the walls. 

“I think that might count as unfair interference in the other bet,” Pronk said. 

“What other bet?” the left-hand-side neighbor asked, interested.

“How this whole business is going to resolve itself,” Pronk said. “I think that Nick is going to show up at her door and talk some sense into her, while Bucky thinks that Judy is going to realize that she loves him too. If he puts antidepressants in the pie, then that makes her motivated and more likely to get her act together.” He sounded pretty unconvinced. “Although to be honest even that isn’t very likely to get her to have her act together. I have watched the entire relationship of Nick and Judy and not once has she had her life together.”  
Judy was pretty sure she would have, at one point, had emotions about this conversation. It seemed like the sort of thing she used to have, emotions. But she couldn’t even imagine what she would have felt. Now everything just felt gray and yucky and horrible and it was impossible to care about much of anything, except perhaps how she could get more time to sleep. So she listened to this convesation with academic interest, as if it were about the dating life of someone else. The only emotion she felt was a bonedeep sense of longing. 

Nick wasn’t there.

“No bets on ‘Judy recovers after a while and does not date Nick but is generally stronger for the experience’?” the left-hand-side neighbor said. “That’s the one I’d go for. I like that Timothy. He’s a gentleman.”

“No,” Pronk said. “We want Nick and Judy to get back together.”

“I thought it was gross and perverted,” Judy said. “You’ve been telling me that. For months.” 

She didn’t really have an opinion about whether that was true-- she vaguely remembered that she’d thought it was true once, and that the thought had put her into such misery-- but she figured she might as well call him on the inconsistency. It wasn’t like there was anything else to do. 

“I changed my mind,” Pronk said. “What’s really gross and perverted is the amount of suffering I have had to endure as a product of your romantic travails, and frankly I would be fine with you getting married to a toaster as long as I never had to listen to Evanescents ever again.”

“Awww,” Bucky said, “you think they’re cute!”

“I may,” Pronk said stiffly, “have been mistaken about whether people in interspecies relationships can be meant for each other. And specifically I may have been mistaken about whether Judy and Nick should be meant for each other.”

Judy’s heart seized up in her throat. The words thudded in her head: meant for each other meant for each other meant for each other meant for each other...

“I still like Timothy,” the left-hand-side neighbor said. 

“You think she would be half this fucked up,” Pronk said, “if Timothy were the one that dumped her?”

Unnoticed by the neighbors bickering over her love life, Judy put a pillow over her head and started quietly to weep. 

\--

Timothy and Judy had scheduled a date. Judy would have cancelled it, except that cancelling dates involved a bunch of really complicated steps, like picking up her phone and typing letters on the keyboard. Probably multiple letters! It was much easier to lie under her blanket and try to prove science wrong about whether bunnies hibernate. 

So Timothy arrived at her door when Judy was still in the sweatpants she’d been wearing constantly when she wasn’t at work and occasionally when she was. They were stained with tears and Chinese takeout and, indeed, tears mingled with Chinese takeout. (They said smell was an aid to memory. She couldn’t smell cheap greasy bamboo without thinking of him, and if that were a kind of ignominious way to remember someone, it wasn’t worse than the rest of her life.)

“Judy, what’s wrong?” Timothy said. 

“Nothing,” Judy said. 

“You haven’t bathed in”-- Timothy sniffed-- “at least a week. You look miserable. Your eyes are red and raw like you have pinkeye. And don’t tell me that the way your fur is rumpled is the latest fashion.”

He wasn’t wrong. 

“So, I see two options here,” Timothy said. “First, you tell me that you need distraction, I won’t pry, I’ll take you to a stupid funny movie and get you out of the house and maybe take you for ice cream after and try to talk you into putting on different pants. Second, you tell me you need to talk about it, and we’ll go to this great little teahouse I know and you’ll tell me everything and we’ll see if there’s some way we can fix this mess.”

Which is why Judy found herself cupping a warm mug between her paws and wondering where to begin. 

“So, you know Nick,” Judy said cautiously. Timothy nodded. “I… we’ve been… that is. We were lovers.”

Timothy nodded. “Go on.” He looked the same way he’d looked as if she had confessed a passion for professional ice-skating: certainly an uncommon preference, but nothing particularly shocking or worthy of criticism. 

“You’re not going to say that that’s sick or perverted or disgusting or tell me to go away and never see you again and how dare I defile your mouth with a mouth that has kissed a fox?” Judy said. 

“No?” Timothy asked. “Why would I do that? I knew a couple of interspecies couples in my community organizing work-- they were all lovely mammals, and no different from any other relationship.”

“Nobody likes interspecies couples,” Judy said. 

“I literally got arrested protesting against speciesism,” Timothy said. “And you think I’m going to have a problem because of who you used to date? Of course I don’t. I’m kind of offended that you would have thought I would.”

Judy didn’t say anything along the lines of “if someone had confessed to me that they were in an interspecies relationship, I would have freaked out.” Even though it was true. She wasn’t really a very good anti-speciesist after all. Instead, Judy steadied her hands on the counter.

“I… fell in love with him, I think,” Judy said. “Or I was always in love with him. It’s hard to tell. And I got freaked out and I decided my feelings for him were just a sign that I was lonely and so I started looking for any rabbit who would have me-- no offense-- and I kept it a secret from him for way too long and then I told him. And. He loves me. And he was so miserable thinking that he would never get to have me that he asked to be assigned to a different partner and now I’ve lost him forever and I feel like such an idiot because if I had just kept it in my pants I would still have my friend.” She was starting to sniffle. She hoped her tears wouldn’t make the tea taste funny. 

“Well,” Timothy said, “I thought I was really into you, but I’m going to have to reconsider, because I didn’t know you were a complete idiot.”

“What?” Judy said. This was not exactly the comfort she had expected.

“You love him,” Timothy said. “He loves you. And instead of being with each other, you’re sobbing into your tea with me, a person who-- unless I miss my mark-- you don’t love and you’re probably never going to.”

“But he’s a fox,” Judy said. 

“So?” Timothy said. “Isn’t the whole point that your species shouldn’t stop you from doing what you want? In Zootopia anyone can be anything-- and that includes the lover of a fox.”

“Mammals of different species can’t really belong together,” Judy said uncertainly, “the way that mammals of the same species can.”

“Seriously?” Timothy said. “Even assuming that’s true as a generalization-- which it isn’t-- can you honestly imagine someone who belongs with you more than Nick?”

A series of images assaulted Judy’s mind. Nick’s face after the Savage Incident, when she’d said he was prone to violence because of evolution and there was nothing that could be done about it. Nick teasing her about her parents. Nick making her laugh when she was sad until she couldn’t even remember what she was sad about. Nick being gentle and patient and kind with her in bed. Nick counting off her pushups. Nick swerving around the corner too fast just to listen to her laugh. Nick pacing as he tried to figure out their latest case. Helping Nick study while he was at the Academy. Telling Nick about what she was doing at work and having him show her a new angle she hadn’t thought of before or tell her who she really needed to talk to. Nick’s face, frozen and flat, when the topic of his childhood came up, and how she’d learned to maneuver adroitly around it whenever it came up, and his flippant tone when he finally was willing to tell her. Judy playing good cop and Nick playing bad cop with perps, because she was a bunny and he was a fox. Realizing, after a while, that Nick’s hustler background made him an ideal good cop and that Judy was a great bad cop because the entire criminal underground was scared shitless of her. The way Nick looked when he was asleep. Nick saying “how come we can’t play good cop/good cop?” Nick’s response to the idea of him being a cop-- “what? Me? Carrots, you’re insane”-- and how patiently she’d worn him down until he could see that they were a partnership that ought to be together. That, well, belonged together. 

“No,” Judy said quietly, looking into her tea. 

“There you go,” Timothy said, leaning back in his seat. 

Judy wasn’t going to give up so easily. The old objections rose to her lips. “But my parents-- the ZPD-- kittens--”

“Look,” Timothy said. “You wanted to be the first bunny cop, right? More than anything in the world?”

“Since I was a little girl,” Judy confirmed. 

“Did people laugh at you about that? Say you couldn’t do it? Discriminate against you? Did your parents disapprove?” Timothy asked. 

“Yes, yes, yes, and yes,” Judy said. “I still have nightmares about that meter maid uniform.”

“So what you’re telling me,” Timothy said, “is that you’re willing to fight for things you want. You’re willing to learn how to beat up a freaking rhino in order to become a cop. And you’re giving up Nick because-- why? Landlady might not rent to you? You might get some weird glances in the street?” 

“It sounds kind of stupid when you put it that way,” Judy said. 

“Like I said,” Timothy said, “complete idiot. Look, I don’t know you super-well, but there are two things I know about you. One is that you’re stubborn, you never give up, and you’ll do anything to be able to fulfill your dreams.”

“Like my dream of being with Nick,” Judy said, nodding to herself. She’d acted foolishly. If she’d acted the same way about becoming a police officer as she had about Nick, she’d still be in Bunnyburrow, farming carrots. “What else do you know?”

Timothy lifted up her chin. It was a friendly and encouraging gesture, without any overtones of romance. “That you’re willing to admit when you’re wrong and fix it.”

“You’re right,” Judy said. She put her cup of tea on the table; it made a loud clacking sound. 

“I usually am,” Timothy said. 

Judy felt a kind of calm certainty, the kind that she felt about becoming a cop. She knew what she was going to do. She had her goal-- a relationship with Nick. She would do anything to be able to get it. She wasn’t going to let anyone stand in her way. And she knew exactly what she had to do. 

The gray fog had lifted. She felt at pleace.

“But what about you?” Judy said. “Don’t you feel… bad that I dated you but I’m in love with someone else?”

“It’s not the greatest feeling in the world,” Timothy said, “but I’m glad it’s coming out now. The last thing I want is to wind up seriously dating someone who’s pining for the fox she can’t have.”

“I’m sorry that I used you as a way to work out my feelings about somebody else,” Judy said. “I hope we can still be friends.”

“Of course,” Timothy said. “I am still in desperate need of someone to talk to who is capable of using full sentences. And besides! Why would I give up the chance to brag about knowing Judy Hopps?”

“You want to brag about knowing me even though I’m a complete idiot?” Judy asked, smiling through her tears. It was the first real smile she’d had in some weeks. 

“Well, they don’t know that.”

\--

Before she went to work, Judy left a message on her parents’ voicemail machine. She picked a time when she knew they’d be out. She knew that she would have to talk to them about this eventually, but she was pretty sure that if she had to say it to her parents’ faces, she’d never be able to get the words out of her mouth. And to be honest she couldn’t face their disapproval. Not now. Not with what she had to say after. 

“Mom, Dad, I haven’t been totally honest with you,” Judy said after the sound of the beep. “You know how you’ve been after me to find someone? Well, I have found someone. And I nearly lost him because of my own stupidity. It’s Nick, Mom and Dad. I love Nick. I want to spend the rest of my life with him. And… I know you don’t really approve of interspecies relationships, but I love him and he loves me. We’re perfect for each other. We fit together. I’m never going to find a rabbit that I want to spend my life with as much as I want to spend my life with Nick. I hope you can be open-minded, just like you got used to the idea of me being a police officer, and get used to the idea of me being with Nick. I love you very much.” 

She bit her lip to avoid saying “I’m sorry.” She was never going to say that she was sorry for Nick again. 

\--

“Announcements,” Chief Bogo said. “First--”

“I have an announcement!” Judy said. 

“You’re really not supposed to do that,” Chief Bogo said. “I make the announcements. This is my job.” 

Judy slid out of her seat and marched in front of the podium, where everyone could see her. Well, where everyone could see the tips of her ears, anyway. Someday they were going to have to redesign this.

“That is not remotely how this works,” Chief Bogo said. ‘If you have something important you want to say, you can add it to the agenda. Hopps, you’ve been trained, you know this.”

But Judy had had a lot of people in her life tell her how things worked, and so far she wasn’t much inclined to listen to any of them. 

Her eyes scanned across the room and found the one person she was looking to announce everything to. Nicholas Wilde. He was solemnly contemplating his desk, tension in every line of his body. He didn’t even want to look at her. It would hurt too much. He’d thought he was safe from seeing her during announcements, and now she’d ruined it for him.

Judy wasn’t guilty. If she had planned it right, he wasn’t going to be hurt for much longer. 

Judy cleared her throat and made sure that her voice was loud so everyone could hear what she had to say. It’d be an anticlimax if she had to repeat everything because she mumbled. “I am in love with Nick Wilde.”

Nick looked up. A flash of hope went across his face. 

“I messed up our relationship because I was too ashamed to admit it,” Judy said, “so now I’m saying it in front of everyone. I love Nick Wilde, and I broke his heart because I wasn’t willing to say my love, and I’m sorry about that, and I am never going to do it again, because he is the most important thing in my world. And you can say whatever you want to me about it, because I’m not going to stop loving him. I became a cop by sheer grit and determination, and if any of you people think I’m going to be less determined about keeping my relationship with Nick, then you are going to be resoundingly disappointed.”

She glanced around at the moment at the faces, which had an exciting variety of expressions, including horror, disbelief, secondhand embarrassment, cautious support, disgust and vague curiosity about what would be available at the cafeteria for lunch. 

But there was only one expression that she really cared about. Judy had never before seen Nick wear the expression that was currently on his face. It looked something like ‘open adoration.’ 

Nick’s voice broke. “Judy--”

“Please say you forgive me,” Judy said, “because if you don’t that is going to have been a really humiliating and unnecessary speech, and I am going to regret it the entire time I have to go to HR training about appropriate conduct in the workplace. And I kind of told my parents, and it would be really mortifying to have to walk that one back.”

But Nick was stumbling out of his seat and he enfolded her in a hug and he didn’t need to say anything because she knew it all already. 

Still, it was nice to have confirmation. “I love you, Nick,” she said. 

“Carrots,” Nick said, “you stupid-- idiotic-- dear God, I don’t even have words for it--”

“You can say ‘I love you too,’” Judy suggested. 

“I love you too,” Nick said. 

“That is literally the opposite of not making me get involved in about your personal life, Hopps,” Chief Bogo said. 

“Aww, I think it’s cute,” Clawhauser said. 

“Your personal life is literally happening right in front of me,” Chief Bogo said. “I can only hope that this is a temporary aberration and soon we will go back to the right order of things in which I don’t ever have to think about who any of my officers love ever again.”

“I’ll tell HR they’re partners again,” Clawhauser said. “I think they deserve the warning.”

“You know, Carrots,” Nick said into her ear, “a simple ‘I want to date you too’ would have sufficed. The whole production was not necessary.”

“Yes, it was,” Judy said. 

Nick considered. “Yeah, you’re right, it was.”

Judy smiled and kissed him. She didn’t notice what the other police were saying. She didn’t care. Now she was home.

\--

Nick and Judy lay in bed together. The sun slanted through the window, dappling their fur. Judy curled her face into Nick’s chest and felt an intense, physical sense that things were okay. For the first time in a very long time, things were okay. 

“Four weeks’ meter maid duty,” Nick said, the sound rumbling through his chest. 

“Pretty light, all things considered,” Judy said. “I think he was happy that we were a team again.”

“And a training from HR,” Nick said, “about the importance of keeping your dating life out of the workplace.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s more a punishment for HR than it is for us,” Judy said. “I wonder who Chief Bogo is mad at.” 

“You know, the news that we’re dating is going to get out eventually,” Nick said. “There are some real blabbermouths on the force. PR is going to go insane.”

“And you can give all the interviews,” Judy said. “Remember what happened last time I gave one.”

“It’s why I’m dating you, to be honest,” Nick said. “You need my quick wit and sharp tongue to save you from yourself.”

“Oh, I know exactly what I want to do with your tongue,” Judy said. 

“Do you now,” Nick said, and then of course there was nothing for it but to show him, and their conversation for a while consisted mostly of giggles and moans. 

“You know,” Judy said when that urgent duty was disposed of, “last time I was on meter maid duty, I got my quota fulfilled by noon. And with you helping me it’s only going to be faster.”

“Really,” Nick said. “I wonder what we’re going to do with all that free time we have now.”

“I don’t know,” Judy said. “I bet there are some other crimes out there we could try to solve. You know, murders, thefts, interspecies bars that don’t have their license...”

“Ooh, crimes,” Nick said. “You know, as an ex-criminal, I am pretty much going to have to object to you trying to solve crimes.”

“Do you now?”

“Yep,” Nick said. “Whole reason I joined the force. Prevent crimes from being solved.”

“How are you going to stop me?” Judy asked.

Nick growled. It sent a shiver of pleasure throughout Judy. “I have some ideas.”

And he showed her exactly what his ideas were, to the dulcet sound of Bucky saying “I won! I won! Beat that, Pronk, I won!”, and the sex they had was never again an accident.


End file.
